Unfortunately considering how many of these gamers are willing to pay extra $30€ just to get 1 week earlier access to a game, I'm afraid you are wrong in this regard and we're going to see prices go up even more. Piracy is also dying, either because of groups disbanding or getting sued, or because of DRM getting better and more widespread, and once that is gone it's going to let publishers jack the price even higher up.
I'm pretty much resigned to just play indie and AA games at this point, there's no way I'm paying 60 or more for these broken, bloated and often overpriced products. There are few exceptions but even they will be driven to higher prices eventually.
I pretty much exclusively buy AA at this point, with the rare AAA nintendo 1st party title that I'm happy to pay $60 for. Most AAA games though just aren't worth it. Some of those games coming out you couldn't pay me to play.
There are so many tbh, really depends on what type of games you're interested in. I've really enjoyed remnant 1 and 2, owlcat pathfinder games, VRising, Riftbreaker, Timberborn, Against the Storm for example. All made by good dedicated studios that deserve your money more than EA, bioware, actiblizz or other corpos like that. Of the older titles, FTL, Into the Breach, Stardew Valley, Hollow Knight, Factorio, Project Zomboid etc are classics - polished games made with love that put pretty much every AAA title to shame in comparison.
I don’t think he’s wrong. AAA game prices have been basically the same for 20+ years, while the cost of making games has only gone up. I think this is why a lot of publishers push for progressively more aggressive microtransactions, which can often hide the actual price of the game’s content. And greed but that’s kind of their job.
The idea that BG3 and Overwatch 2 released at the same price point is actually ludicrous. With AAA games, the price is standard and if you don’t like the game, oh well fuck you. And I would absolutely pay extra for games from developers which invested more, and had a higher standard of quality. Larian could charge $100 for their next CRPG and I’d be all in. Similarly, I don’t think minimally viable cash grab titles or smaller, maybe more experimental titles should release for more than like $30.
I think the indie scene does this pretty well but it’s a challenge for AAA, and consumers are somewhat to blame. I think people would balk more at an $80 standard price than a $60 half-complete game with $4k of microtransactions. So of course, studios are going to go with the latter strategy, even though plenty of people hate it.
AAA wouldn't remove macrotransactions to counter the higher price, they would just charge more for the game and keep everything the same. The current generation has been conditioned by mtx, it's no longer a whale problem. it's a norm that the average consumer accepts and buys into, which has fucked the industry.
Overwatch was priced at $40 on launch, it was just multiplayer after all. They priced it brilliantly and the mtx they had were pointless and non-invasive, a far cry to what that game has devolved into these days. Overwatch '2' was a forced patch which turned the game free-to-play and added all the aforementioned cancer mtx.
BG3 is $60, without any mtx. So I don't really understand the point you are making at all, it is just false that they were priced the same, BG3 didn't need to cost more, if it's cheaper it's more accessible to more people and the volume of sales makes up for the lower price, don't forget (like they want you to) there are a LOT more people playing and buying games now than 5, 10, 20 years ago.
Games are half-baked because people's standards have dropped and they will just buy half-baked shit, people still pre-order digital games... or they buy special editions to let them play the game 3 days early or whatever, the situation we are in is the fault of mindless consumption, not the fact game prices haven't significantly increased.
Until AAA games can remove the predatory monetisation, and gain our trust back, we should not be agreeing to be charged more. These companies aren't struggling, they are turning over record profits. Support indie developers, fuck AAA.
What this CEO and you conveniently forget is the fact, that there are more Games sold every year. Since those are digital goods and copy costs are near zero, those companies are making more money each year already. They also pretty much killed the ability to sell used Games, except for Console Games with a physical medium.
Also: why should the consumers have to pay for the ballooning Overhead that those companies have? Don’t tell me you need a hundred million dollars in your marketing department to sell a GOOD/GREAT game. That is Bullshit.
Game prices are already pushing $100+ when you factor in season passes, special editions, and microtransactions. Basically every AAA game has some combo of all of these.
The problem that they're not considering is that if they raise the prices, more people are going to be priced out of buying the games, and will resort to piracy. The cost of living is absurd right now, and I can only afford a handful of $60 games a year.
I'm not going to argue the ethics of piracy, because the point is that a lot of people will do it if they otherwise cannot afford to buy games. Also, some games just never really go down in price, especially if you're talking nintendo. To this day Breath of the Wild is still $60 if bought new or digitally.
The AAA market seems to be chasing a business model that isn’t there any more. I don’t know why game developers still chase photo realism, it isn’t what makes money.
There are still good AAA releases, it’s just that 95% of AAA games are not worth the price.
I would argue the old business model still works, it’s just that most AAA games studios don’t follow that model anymore. Back in the day, a full priced game didn’t have DLC or MTX, was an actual complete game, and focused more on the fun than the profit making. Games tried new ideas, they innovated instead of chasing whatever fad is popular at the time. It’s the modern AAA game business model that is the problem and doesn’t work anymore.
If 95% of the games aren’t worth the price, then there is something wrong with that business model.
Yeah, a full priced game might not have had DLC or MTX, but it was more expensive adjusting for inflation and didn’t have nearly the quantity or quality of in game assets as current games do.
And old games definitely chased fads, they were just different fads at the time fed in part by the differences in game economics.
Not to mention until it's actually photo-realistic, it looks uncanny. It's better to find a style and use that than to chase realism imo. But then again, these AAA games just add a bunch of foliage, some god rays, maybe a sprinkle of rain and people are oooh, aaah-ing and coughing up their cash.
This is all software, companies keep finding excuses to tack on “features” that increase development cost which eventually lead to necessary price increases.
In the professional world you will rarely ever hear project managers and leaders ask the question “would our customers rather pay extra for feature X or save money by sticking to their simpler feature set?” This is because development is nearly always started with the long term goal of incorporating a feature into the product to increase the overall “value” of the product. This increased “value” of the product then means that the company should charge more for it.
Honestly, he’s right. Game prices are the same 60-70 dollars they’ve been for 30 years, but nothing else has stayed the same price that long. With inflation, a game should be around 200 dollars.
Super Mario Bros 3 came out in the last half of 1988 and costed $50 dollars, or around 127 dollars. It also costed about $800,000 to develop, which is about $2 million today.
Nowadays, it costs around $80 million (about 40x) on average to make a AAA title that costs $60 (about half). This is why all these games have cash shops and battle passes and paid dlc and whatnot: they need to make up that extra cost somewhere.
I can understand woth this information companies wanting to charge more, but I feel like standards need to be higher and refunds guaranteed. They can't ask us to spend 100's of dollars on half-complete, buggy messes of games AND also want to charge for DLC and have micro-transactions.
And don't forget it's just a rental of the game, at any time they could shut off the game or license servers because they don't want to sell or keep that game anymore.
While i agree that prices have been stagnant, its also a game of companies wanting to reduce risk. You have unicorn examples like Baldurs Gate 3 which took its time to develop a game, and has stated they dont plan on making paid expansion content, meaning where they at they see the game as profitable, despite spending 5 years in development for it.
Part of the reason why some games have balooned cost is because of improper spending of the money. Many spend a lot of money on marketing which tends to have an overly inflated cost on its own, due to the fact that people have a preference to play whats familliar, however its been shown that also actually making a good game with little marketing also works, and a lot of dev studios havent gotten to that point yet.
Super Mario Bros also only sold about 2.5 million units in the first several month after release. Baldur's Gate, for example, sold almost 6 million in 2 weeks. The NES sold 2.5 million units in its first year. The Switch sold 13 million. Even the worst selling modern console, the Xbox Series X sold 8 million in the first year. While individual game prices have not risen, the total number of sales has dramatically increased. So pardon me if I don't think the cost of games not rising has been a problem for publishers and developers of AAA titles. Their real problem has been putting out good content that enough gamers want.
Distribution is getting easier and cheaper, the available talented workforce is larger than ever, tools are getting better and faster with every day and despite "no large increase in costs", the gaming industry has grown to be one of the largest and most profitable industries in the entire world and everyone wants a piece of that cake.
$60 is fine and anything above that is pure greed.
I buy games that release for $40 and $50. They don't have dlc. They don't have microtransactions. They don't have cash shops. They don't have battle passes. I just pay my $40/$50, get my physical copy, often with a bundled goodie like cards or keychains, and play and enjoy my 40hr game.
It's absolutely possible because the companies that release these titles are pumping out several per year. You just.... have to stop spec racing and obsessing over 200hr playtimes and top of the line graphics and actually focus on making a decent, mid-sized game, with realistic expectations.
Even the most terrible AAA games sell millions of copies these days. They more than make their money back with each one, the margins are slimmer but the volume is magnitudes higher than ever. Cry me a river.
This exact thought (volume) occurred to me when I saw the headline. They like to say that the price of games hasn’t increased in line with inflation, but I’d be interested to know how big the market was in the 80s, 90s, 2000s and today. I’d bet the market is orders of magnitude bigger today.
I’d be curious comparing these prices to median income or median disposable income. I’m guessing it tracks those numbers much closer than inflation, which wages haven’t kept pace with.
And the profitability has skyrocketed. The videogame industry is now one of the largest insudtries on the planet. A big driver has been normalisation of after-purchase items. Console players now pay to unlock their collar to the internet (ps+ and XBlive). Microtransactions add to this, and now battlepasses want $10+ every 50-90 days. Lootboxes normalizing near-gambling with overwatches success was a huge bar-lift in profitability expectations for shareholders.
Special editions are also hitting $90 and higher, plus those other expenditures. Ask “the gamers tm” and they’ll tell you you have to buy a special edition for $120 or you’re not a real fan anyway. Starfield has a $300 version. The Digital Premium doesn’t even come with the GAME! It’s another $35 after you already gave Microsoft $70.
Additionally, the work to make a new game has decreased. Assets are able to be salvaged from one engine to the next reducing the amount of work to make a game in UE6 after it was on UE5. the workforce has matured and can be taught as a class so there’s not nearly as many “self taught” making half a game. Roller Coaster Tycoon was made almost entirely by one dude. Obviously re-using assets is smart. But then to say you “built the game from the ground up” is false. Elden Ring was even praised for it
Marketing budgets have fuckin EXPLODED. A “Rule of Thumb” for indie devs is to spend HALF your budget on just marketing. Destiny allegedly spent 2.5× what they spent on development, for marketing. Publishing studios didn’t used to spend this much. “For every dollar on the game, spend another .25 to .50 on marketing”
Buying power has gone DOWN since ps1. You think I’m joking but federal minimum wage in the US is still 7.25. In 1994 (launch of ps1). It was 4.25 - adjusted for inflation thats $8.43. Meaning if you made minimum wage then, you’d be making more than minimum wage now, effectively. People are fucking broke and game companies want MORE money for games.
In 1994 when you bought a PS1 game you got THE WHOLE GAME. That was it. There was no merch drop pip-boy for the special edition. There was no Day-One patch. There was no “pay to get multiplayer”. There was no in-game shop to buy skins for the characters. All these features were intentionally cut to resell to consumers post-launch.
Games cost less to make now, but budgets went up. Buying power is down. Please stop defending corporate bullshit excuses about wanting more money, forever.
It was a specific example to show how AAA games reuse assets, not mtx. A low hanging fruit of that could be like…any sports game.
A similar example of good reuse could be EA and a specific Female Character Mesh they’ve had for awhile and they just keep reusing her. The photo example I found searching was Falck from BF 2042. Her hitbox and mesh is in Battlefront 2, as a First Order officer; and in Battlefield 5.
I dont outright hate reuse of things here and there - it saves money and time.
This drives me crazy every time I see it so I’m glad to see others recognizing this. Yes game production has gone up, but the market has massively increased. Your costs are fixed; doesn’t matter if you sell 10,000 copies or 10,000,000. More people are gaming than ever so when I see all these attempts to squeeze more money from consumers to address rising costs I have no sympathy for the publisher.
if you dropped game to $30 from $60, would double or more people buy it? or would too many people see the lower price and think it must be a shitty game to be 'that low' and pass on it?
Paying customers are footing the bill for that anti-theft
The guy is making over $500k off someone else’s product with a couple days’ work. I’m no Tankie, but you don’t have to be a high schooler or a pothead to have a problem with capitalism’s more toxic extremes. People have been conditioned to forget this, but piracy is a counter-leverage to prevent product pricing from going out of control. Just look at the average prices of Switch games vs PC games. The harder it is to pirate a product, the further the price of that product is from a value consensus.
These types of anti-thefts tend to false-fire for the paying customers (who footed the bill). This is especially true because he builds his mods against a closed-source product that behaves in ways he cannot always predict. Published modding interfaces are never perfect.
The real value of the “product” was done by (m/b)illion dollar investments by Nvidia and game companies facilitating support for FSR or alternate upscalers. His “product” takes a few days to implement and others are able to offer the same “product” for free.
He is making a ridiculous amount of money considering the amount of work required and feels like an insult to modders who actually spend hundreds of hours tinkering and publishing their work for free. He already makes more than he deserves on patreon, why is he so sensitive about others pirating it.
So someone will take his mods and make actual pirate versions of them. If he's trying to Streisand it, couldn't have done a better job. I don't see it being very profitable, though...
Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the answer to the question that’s posted all the time on gaming forums of: “Phones are so powerful these days, especially compared to the Switch, why can’t we have real games on phones without microtransactions?”
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